‘I s forgiveness and being forgiven an important part of gratitude?”

I was asked this as Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, an Iraqi-born Assyrian bishop in Sydney, released a statement from a hospital forgiving the teenager who stabbed him during Mass last week.

We were in Manhattan talking about gratitude as a civic virtue — something I do routinely around the country as part of National Review Institute’s (Edmund) Burke to (William F.) Buckley program. There’s always something different in every session in each city. But even more so during this one. I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a group of people who had signed up to talk about conservative principles who were less interested in talking about politics.

They wanted to talk about religious faith. They wanted to know how to forgive and be forgiven! I kept reminding them of why we could even have the conversation — people had come before us who saw the world through a religious lens. And the program participants valued that. They revered that. But they also seemed tired of thinking about politics. They wanted to talk about virtue. And family. And passing on all that is good and beautiful. One of the participants, for example, served in the military and works in finance, but his heart is in music — he’s performing at Carnegie Hall this week.

Uptown around the same time, people were lighting flares protesting Israel as Passover was about to begin. The vast majority of Israelis are people of the Old Testament, but they simply have to be a forgiving people because of all that they have suffered. I just saw another one of those signs about kidnapped Israelis on a streetlamp in the city. It was of a little boy, and I couldn’t bear to Google to see if we knew whether he was dead or alive.

How do you forgive Hamas? Can you forgive Hamas? These questions are probably above my pay grade. And that wasn’t what was being asked around our discussion table that night. It was all closer to home. I don’t know everything that was on the hearts of those who were gathered, but it was more about eternal things than historic things, even as they all had an interest in learning and remembering and not forgetting so much that had come before in U.S. and world history.

So, do you have to forgive to be grateful? Do you have to be open to receive forgiveness? Absolutely. Because you can’t be grateful without humility. We need to understand that we are creations of a Creator who didn’t have to will us into existence. There’s got to be something more going on than mere biology — which is why we’re implored to look out for the widows and orphans, because we have a responsibility to the Creator for every life.

You might think I’m crazy if I tell you that the question about forgiveness could be applied to our politics. At the same time, for some of the most intimate and contentious issues in the headlines, maybe it would not be the craziest thing in the world.

“I urge the faithful to not respond to these events with fear, avoiding places of worship because they are worried about further attacks, nor with anger, engaging in acts of reprisal or revenge,” the Catholic archbishop in Sydney, Anthony Fisher, said in response to the attack on Emmanuel and on several others who had been present at last Monday’s Mass. “The best response to violence and fear is prayer and peace.”

Peace seems foreign to our lives. It’s not just Ukraine and Russia or Israel and Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah (will that list go on?). How about our hearts? That’s what was striking to me about the Manhattan gathering: to be at, frankly, a high-end club having a conversation on first principles and about how to live together in a democratic republic, and to see that everyone wanted to talk about virtue and forgiveness. I assume it’s because we’re overwhelmed by the opposite.

One of the readings I include in our gratitude sessions quotes the families of people who were murdered during the Christian and Yazidi genocide perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq, and of the Coptic Christians who were beheaded in Libya in 2015. Their radical forgiveness for those who brutally killed their loved ones is jarringly challenging. They testify to the fact that when you truly forgive, you are grateful not only for what you have been given but also for the opportunity to forgive others and even do ridiculous acts of charity and sacrifice for them.

There’s a Catholic devotion, which Pope John Paul II popularized, focused on divine mercy. A young woman from Iraq, around the time of the genocide, talked to an arena of English-speaking young people on pilgrimage to Poland to pray with Pope Francis about members of her family who had been killed. She had the inspiration to adapt some of the words of the prayer: “Have mercy on ISIS, and on the whole world.”

Most days, we can’t even forgive people who tweet — or X — at us. And that isn’t even what matters most, as my new friends in New York reminded me. None of us was stabbed during Mass. Mercifully, most of us won’t be. But there are things — and they may be partly political, but they probably run deeper — that we all need to forgive or be forgiven for. We need to get on that. It would make us more grateful. It would help with peace and joy. We would love more and prioritize more. With forgiveness and gratitude, we might not leave the most hurtful, intimate issues to mere politics. We might actually encounter one another with love, instead.

“I will always pray for you,” Emmanuel said to his attacker. Peace, forgiveness, gratitude do seem to be worth a few prayers.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.